Post to @emsenn@kolektiva.social, 2025-09-09 08:25h

September 19th is Talk Like a Pirate Day.

People think that means yelling “ahoy” or “avast.” But that's Treasure Island movie talk, not real pirate talk.

Pirate talk wasn’t (just) about silly words. It was about refusing to speak the language of kings and merchants. (A very serious thing, so speaking sillily is a fine way to refuse, on its own.)

What made a pirate ship a pirate ship was that it rejected the laws of the empires around it, laws that were communicated with words. So words make a big part of that rejection possible: pirates developed their own specific "codes" for how to organize their efforts, in a world dominated by one code.

On a pirate ship, the captain wasn’t a monarch. He was elected, and he could be deposed the moment he stopped serving the crew. The quartermaster wasn’t a servant; he was the counter-power that kept the captain in check. Articles weren’t law imposed from above; they were agreements drafted and sworn collectively. If a crewmember was injured, lots of ships' code guaranteed their share, because survival depended on everyone being taken care of.

That’s what gave pirate words their force. “Mate” wasn’t a gimmick. It named an equal, someone with a voice and a stake. “Share” wasn’t wages; it was recognition that the plunder belonged to all, not hoarded by bosses or thrones. Even the insults, the threats, the bravado! they came from a world where empire’s rules had no legitimacy.

Pirates carried the violence of their time: patriarchy, racism, brutality. They weren’t outside history. But they also proved that crews of outcasts could generate their own order, one that terrified rulers precisely because it was anarchic, egalitarian, and contagious.

So if you want to talk like a pirate today, don’t (just) pretend with accents. Speak the way they did: from a code made by equals, against the legitimacy of law, in defiance of the world that tries to govern you. That’s pirate talk.

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This kinda-shitpost might actually be a better explanation of why I spent yesterday tinkering with Moscow-school semiotics, which is all about interoperable codes that don't rely on a central hierarchy: Babble, [2025-09-17 Wed 23:05], Drafting a Fennel library for semiotics.